One for the road
I just don’t seem to learn, do I?
I quit!
After working for a few years for this company, I decided to leave. I had to negotiate with my manager and the HR guy how long I would have to stay on.
The manager proposed that I stay on until I finished “Project X”, a customisation of two of our products for one of our biggest customers. At this company we had a habit of starting projects with many, unclear feature requests and then piling on more features as we were developing. We were all too busy with frantically churning out code to notice the whooshing sound of the deadlines as they flew by. We felt like Mr Creosote, being fed one “wafer-thin” feature at a time, until we exploded. If past performance was an indicator, it would be at least a year before that project would be done and I could get out.
We finally agreed that I would stay on another 5 weeks, the legal minimum. I would do as much of Project X as I could in these last few weeks.
An offer he couldn’t refuse
I asked the product manager to select the few most important features that would satisfy the customer AND that I could implement in a few weeks. He was not amused; he wanted “everything”, as usual. My final offer: “either you get some features OR you get none. It’s your choice, I’m off in 5 weeks in any case”. He grumblingly took the first option and complained to everyone who’d listen about “those developers getting uppity”.
We selected a set of features that was both feasible and provided the customer with a coherent implementation of their requirement. The metaphor we used was: “This is like a software patch panel, so that the customer doesn’t have to waste time manipulating the wiring on the hardware patch panel.”
The knights who say ni no!
Everything had gone smoothly: no features had been added during development. Not that the product manager didn’t try, but I could now afford to say no. Everything had been done according to the company’s process, including all the documents and documentation. I had worked at a relaxed, leisurely pace and yet I had accomplished more than on any other project at that company. In the process I had refactored a particularly nasty piece of code (more on that later) and created a reused piece of code.
4 weeks later…
The product manager performed the acceptance tests. He grumbled about all those missing features. He found a few small errors. We found a major oversight in the requirements: the UI didn’t indicate how the “patch panel” was (re)wired, which was very confusing. Oops!
Next day, I fixed the small errors and we performed the acceptance tests again. Passed.
Around the process in one day
Next day, we discussed how the “wiring visualisation” feature should work, I adapted the specification document, adapted the design, modified our MVC framework, used that to update all affected UIs in both applications and we performed the acceptance tests again. Passed. We had just gone through our whole development process in a single day.
Done. That left me two days to say goodbye to everyone and buy the drinks and snacks for the farewell party. This the most fun AND productive project I’d ever done at that company. And it was the only one that finished on time. I should have quit more often!
And all those extra features? They were never implemented.
And what have we learned from this?
I left for bigger and better things. Well, not bigger and not always better, either. I still scheduled based on features. I still believed that the customer needed all the features they asked.
And things were back to normal: deadlines slipped, goalposts moved. Developers got demotivated. Except for the small (1 month or so) projects… That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?
